Despite, his limitations it might well have fallen apart sooner if another man had been on the throne. Franz Joseph was a competent emperor but he had the misfortune to be on the throne when the empire's time ran out. In the end, he brought down the Habsburg monarchy. All his moves appeared sensible at the time. To compensate for the loss of his territories in the Italian peninsula, he annexed Bosnia thus setting off WWI. He tried to stop the increase of Russian influence in the Balkans and was opposed the expansion of Prussia. He fought unsuccessfully to retain Austria's states in Northern Italy. He was opposed to democracy and believed that Europe should be ruled by absolute Catholic monarchs. Despite his application, he lacked vision and wound up resisting the march of history at every turn. While he never took off his uniform except in the bedroom, he understood perfectly well that he was nothing more than a parade ground soldier. He was fluent in Czech and Hungarian as well as his native German. Franz Joseph frugal, dutiful and very hard working. Palmer's biography is a model of fairness and balance. His restraint and integrity are to be applauded but the BBC will obviously need to use a different source when it finally decides to do a television series on his eventful life. Despite all this gore and melodrama, Palmer's biography is a model of propriety focussing primarily on Franz Joseph's political, military and diplomatic actions. Finally Franz Joseph's wife was present on the other side of Lake Starnberg, the night that the body of her first cousin and close friend Ludwig II of Bavaria was dumped in it by his murderers. His brother who was briefly King of Mexico was over turned and executed by Benito Juarez (for which act a relatively unknown Italian socialist Alessandro Mussolini named his son Benito). His nephew and heir apparent to the throne was assassinated by a Serbian terrorist in June 1914. His eldest son the Crown Prince Rudolf died in a suicide pact with a teenage actress. Franz Joseph's wife Sisi who was a bigger pain in the ass than Lady Di came to an equally tragic end assassinated by a Italian anarchist.
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